The next bear market will come like the proverbial 'thief in the night' and none of us can predict the hour or day. Preparing clients for bearish times may be more important than portfolio design. But how?

Financial planning's "third wave" may well be a four-factor service model that places much greater emphasis on helping clients maximise their human capital, not just their financial capital.

The younger generation of clients who are now in their 30s and 40s has a very different financial outlook than their Baby Boomer parents. Advisers need to retool their client service and advice models to appeal.

After years of talking with clients coming to his firm from other advisers, one adviser compiled a list of reasons they left. I suspect these practices are widespread.

Whenever clients are thinking about putting money that would have been invested into paying back their mortgage, they may be disadvantaging themselves.

A new study of using brain imaging technology suggests investors second-guess non-CFP advisers more than those with the credential.

Here's one adviser who has mastered social media and how it fits together, to stand out in the profession's "sea of sameness".

Everybody who communicates with the investing public needs to sound a warning: we're in a classic bubble.

Most of the reasons why clients come to your door involve stressful changes in their money situations and their lives. Here are some tools that can help you do a better job of helping people successfully navigate significant shifts in their financial lives...

How do we take into account the trade-off between clients’ willingness to risk running out of money in return for enjoying their retirement portfolio now?

Advisers could grow their client bases much more quickly if they could eliminate the bad habit of asking their clients for referrals...

After the 2008 meltdown, is Roger Gibson - one of the most consistent apostles of modern portfolio theory - still touting the value of holding diverse asset classes?

The financial advisory profession may be in the process of creating opportunities and challenges similar to the huge transformation of the early 1990s. Internet-based information consolidators and financial organisers, hooked into planning calculators, will commoditise the adviser's traditional value proposition - how should advisers respond to be successful in the future?

While the original Markowitz formulations might not be perfect, the problems in client portfolios during the last market meltdown can be traced to naive inputs...

The 7th annual Portfolio Construction Forum took place in what for many professionals would be considered the eye of a financial hurricane. The news over the prior 12 months had been awful in virtually every domestic financial sector, and the world was fighting through a global credit crisis that had replaced the days of easy money and leverage with a liquidity crisis and flight to quality that threatened international returns for the next half-decade. Delegates arrived with a single mission: to deconstruct the root causes of the domestic and global meltdown, and figure out how to help their clients ride out the storm...

It would have been hard to pick a better time to bring together 500 of Australia's leading portfolio construction professionals. Conference came hard on the heels of the 30 June deadline for post-tax super contributions of up to $1 million and then, during conference week, the US subprime meltdown shaved 6% off global equities...

Our visiting fellow, Bob Veres, summarises the most important things he's taken from the two-day PortfolioConstruction Conference 2007 program, and the follow up he'd be doing if he was a Practitioner delegate...

In the next few weeks, the publishing industry will have given us two books that, paired together, blow the doors off of conventional market theory. Both acknowledge that if you want to study and understand the markets, instead of examining the movements of stock prices, you have to shift your attention to the people who are actually making the trades...

A few years back, Roger Gibson offered a very simple four-part matrix to help advisers determine what they believe about investing. Some commentators are now rethinking one quadrant which they used to reject out of hand...

At a recent financial planning conference in Toronto, Burton Malkiel - author of A Random Walk Down Wall Street – answered the question "Will indexing work as well in the next 30 years as it has for the last decade?" and previewed his research into hedge funds…